1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to medical-surgical supplies for hospitals and, more particularly, to disposable containers for used medical-surgical materials, including "sharps," such as hypodermic needles, suture needles and scalpel blades.
2. Summary of the Prior Art
This decade has seen an acceleration of a trend in the medical care provision field concerning the use of disposable, one-use medical-surgical devices and materials. This is a trend away from the former procedure of sterilization and reuse of these devices, both to reduce the high labor costs involved in the sterilization and to ensure that materials and devices used are completely sterile. Cost tradeoffs have shown this use-and-dispose philosophy compares quite favorable with the previous method.
Present hospital protocol in those institutions employing the use-and-dispose philosophy entails the assembly and distribution by unskilled personnel of a clean, but not sterilized, flexible plastic or paper container to those locations where containment is required, such as, operating rooms, nurses' stations, soiled linen rooms and emergency rooms. These containers may be used in the "sterile field" of the operating room, for example, on the "back table" when it is in the sterile field of the operating room or outside of the sterile field, where the "sterile nurse" passes the used materials to be disposed of to the "circulating nurse," who then disposes of the materials in the container.
After the containers are filled, they are typically collected by unskilled housekeeping personnel and taken for disposal. In some states this involves processing of the used materials by incineration, and in some states, by law, the materials are "red-bagged" or boxed, and stored for pickup by contract disposal personnel. They, in turn, transport the materials to be disposed to another location where they are autoclaved under low pressure steam for a predetermined time to sterilize them, then rebagged and taken to a landfill for burial.
Experience has taught that this disposal chain affords ample opportunity for unskilled personnel to be injured and/or contaminated by contact with used medical-surgical materials. Thus, a problem created by the use-and-dispose philosophy is that of containing and disposing of the used materials, much of which includes dangerously sharp implements referred to as "sharps" in the field, both within the hospital environment and in the disposal chain. Anther and related problem is the safe containment until disposal of those sharps which might be put to illicit uses, such as for example, hypodermic needles, were they to fall into unauthorized hands.
A number of storage and disposal containers have been developed to accommodate the use-and-dispose philosophy and alleviate the aforementioned disposal considerations. Exemplary thereof is the rigid disposable container of U.S. Pat. No. 4,842,138, issued Jun. 27, 1989 to Sandel, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by this reference. In that invention, five plastic molded pieces were snapped together to form a single disposable container. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,107,990 issued Apr. 28, 1992 to Wicherski, et al., discloses another closure lid for a rigid disposable container configured to safely contain and dispose of medical-surgical materials. The disclosures of this latter patent are also incorporated herein by this reference. In the Wicherski, et al. invention, two lightweight plastic pieces form a container lid having a large opening for the insertion of used materials which can be permanently sealed by sliding a flush cover into a closed and locked position.
As useful as the Sandel and Wicherski, et al. containers are for the storage and disposal of used medical-surgical materials, there is still room for improvement. It would, for example, be advantageous to provide a medical-surgical disposal container with some mechanism for avoiding inadvertent closure or locking of the disposal opening. Accordingly, the present invention fulfills this and other needs.